Tana French citations

“I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.”

“I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.”

“What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this -- two things: I crave truth. And I lie.”

“I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack”

“My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.”

“Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.”

“Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.”

“Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.”

“We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.”

“Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.”

“For a moment, I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be alright.”

“A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone's nose, but if a girl's got brains and looks and personality, she's going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.”

“Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.”

“I am, of course, romanticizing; a chronic tendency of mine.”

“Take what you want and pay for it, says God. You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and you will have to pay it.”

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

“I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.”

“People you knew when you were teenagers, the ones who saw your stupidest haircut and the most embarrassing things you've done in your life, and they still cared about you after all that: they're not replaceable, you know?”

“Sarte was right, Hell is other people”

“I love beautiful; always have. I never saw why I should hate what I wish I had. Love it harder. Work your way closer. Clasp your hands around it tighter. Till you find a way to make it yours.”

“Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they'd be different”

“If she had hurt me, I could have forgiven her without even having to think about it; but I couldn't forgive her for being hurt.”

“I don't do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you're already halfway down.”

“There was a time when I believed I was the redeemed one, the boy borne safely home on the ebb of whatever freak tide carried Peter and Jamie away. Not any more. In ways too dark and crucial to be called metaphorical, I never left that wood.”

“I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you've lost.”

“But give me more credit than that. Someone else may have dealt the hand, but I picked it up off the table, I played every card, and I had my reasons.”

“We think of mortality so little these days…
I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones.
Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by,
As you are now so once was I:
As I am so will you be…”

“We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to.”